chaplin 02

The second in my Charlie Chaplin exercises.

samurai sketches

Finally got round to sketching out some samurais. I don’t really want to remodel the head unless it is particularly bad (haven’t looked at the file in a while) but thought I’d have a sketch of different styles to see if anything grabbed my attention/imagination. The clothes however, I’d like to change to something like the character on the far right, with pants. I’d really love to use cloth, but haven’t tested anything out yet, and not looking forward to either.. It should be do-able through polygon modeling, though not nearly as baggy as I would like which I think unfortunately would lose some integrity towards a samurai’s appearance. I might spend some time next week experimenting with cloth, so we’ll see how it goes.

Chaplin 01

The first in my Chaplin exercises.

11 second club scrapped

Long time no see, been working on the 11 second club animation here and there but having trouble from an acting perspective so decided to put doing that on hold and go a step backwards. I’ve decided instead to just animate some Charlie Chaplin clips. They’re only a few seconds long each but are full of character, clear poses and exaggeration. I don’t see the point of rushing anything and think baby steps are best.

I will be continuing with the Samurai project, have watched a few films and will start sketching out new character clothes. Rendering on the football clip is still on hold. Currently have less money than I was anticipating for a new PC but just got my yearly bonus at work so we’ll see.

11 seconds

I decided a while ago I might try and do an 11 second club entry. Only thing is I don’t like the sound clip for this month, I wanted something dialogue based so went and got one of the clips from a few months back. The first step I’ve done is recorded myself acting to the sound clip over and over again. There wasn’t one perfect performance, but each time was slightly different, bringing out different ideas.

The rig I’ll be sing id the Hogan rig and won’t be doing anything else with the clip other than animating the characters. I will aim to get it done within the month despite going on a short holiday next week. We’ll see how it goes.

the next project

I don’t really want to do much on the football project until I get the new computer and do more render testing.
So I’m going to start pre-production on the next project, which is a return to the samurai project I started a while back. It’s a great excuse to just sit around and watch movies I love
I’ll definitely be spending more time sketching the character out this time. This is what I did about 18 months ago:

Problem being the clothes aren’t samurai based, a choice I made to make things easier for me all round, but something I noticed Japanese people picked up on right away. Might go back and have a look at using nCloth, but really don’t want to head down that road. Samurai clothes are generally pretty baggy which isn’t something you’d really want on a simple 3D animation. I’ll be keeping the story and bad guys the same. Will have to tweak + fix up the environment a bit.

My main reference point will be the Loan Wolf and Cub film series and am trying to get hold of the original manga (the first pic). I’ve already watched a few of Kurosawa’s samurai films so am keen to check out other director’s work for reference material. I included Samurai Jack in there and not a huge fan of it, although I thought some episodes were very nicely done. The Samurai Champloo anime (orange pic) really showed that having a plot doesn’t in any way subtract from some great action.

But for now there’ll just be a lot of watching, cutting up some reference clips and a bit of drawing.

sound. done.

For the most part the clip is now done. Like I said I’ve put off rendering until I get a new computer, which will be after I come back from a short summer holiday in a couple weeks.
Sound was a lot of fun to do. It was the first time I’ve ever fired up Garage Band and was surprised it was entirely adequate. The only hard part was finding sound effects.

Will be start pre-production on the next clip pretty soon I think.

new machine ?

Was doing some test renders again yesterday and was started to realise how long rendering would take. I’m now thinking of buying a new computer, specifically for animation. Much larger screen, 4 times the RAM and an extra GHz actually isn’t all that expensive.. I recently sold some of my digital camera lenses with the money paying for about 3/4’s of a new machine.

I’m going to put off rendering until I make a decision. But from today I’ll be doing sound! fun fun.

render testing

Have fine tuned the animation and doing some render testing. Don’t mind where it’s going..

My aim was to have it complete by the 26th, which seems doable. I’m going to start doing sound this week and have no idea how long that will take, it’s been a long time since I’ve done any sound work. Luckily the animation is only 18 seconds..

environment

I’ve animated everything but have to go back and fine tune a few places, but before doing that I thought I’d set up the environment as a change of pace. I want to keep it quite simple and not invest too much time but don’t want the animation to fall flat on it’s face because it looks like crap either. Think I’ll just spend another day or two on it.